The Museo de Cádiz is the province's main museum, set in a late neoclassical building on Plaza de Mina. It holds the two Phoenician anthropoid sarcophagi found in Spain and a fine-arts collection that includes Zurbarán's paintings for the Jerez Charterhouse. Admission is free for EU citizens and €1.50 for everyone else, so the real cost of a visit is time, not the ticket.
The museum is three collections under one roof: archaeology, fine arts and a smaller ethnography section. Building works that began in 2023 closed some rooms for a long stretch, so confirm which are open before you plan around a particular object.
The Phoenician sarcophagi
Archaeology is the reason most visitors come. The rooms follow the province from prehistory through Phoenician-Punic Gadir to Roman Gades and Baelo Claudia, and the two Phoenician anthropoid sarcophagi are the centrepiece. The male one was found by chance in 1887 on ground belonging to the Cádiz shipyards, and that discovery started the archaeology collection.
The female sarcophagus, known as the Dama de Cádiz, came to light on 26 September 1980, when foundation works in calle Ruiz de Alda struck marble. It dates to about 480 BC.
Its discovery has a neat irony. Pelayo Quintero Atauri, director of the provincial museum, spent years convinced that a female sarcophagus must exist to match the male one and died without finding it. It turned up a century later under a palm tree at his old house. In 2020 a University of Cádiz team went further, reporting that the person buried inside was a robust man of about 45 to 50, so the nickname is now a museum habit rather than a description.
Zurbarán and the fine-arts rooms
The fine-arts collection started in 1835 with paintings from convents closed under the Mendizábal disentailment, and it became the Provincial Museum of Fine Arts of Cádiz. Its best-known group is the set Zurbarán painted for the Jerez Charterhouse between 1637 and 1639. All of them come from that monastery except Pentecost, which came from the Consulado de Cargadores a Indias, the Indies traders' body in the port.
The Baroque rooms also hold work by Alonso Cano, Rubens, Carreño de Miranda and Murillo, and the museum has a Joan Miró in its contemporary section. A temporary exhibition, Nexos. Del lienzo al objeto, sets paintings beside archaeological objects to show daily life and trade in early modern Cádiz. It runs on the first floor of the fine-arts building from 11 September 2026 to 10 January 2027.
The building on Plaza de Mina
The museum has stood on Plaza de Mina since 1935, in a building Juan Daura designed in 1838 and shared with the city's Academy of Fine Arts. Daura is the same architect who took over the works at Cádiz Cathedral in 1832. The archaeology and fine-arts museums were merged into the present institution only in 1970.
If you are choosing between the two sections, the answer depends on the traveller. Archaeology puts the Roman Theatre in the longer story of Gadir and Gades, while fine arts is the one to pick for Spanish Baroque painting.
Opening hours and visiting
The Junta de Andalucía publishes these hours:
| Day | Hours |
|---|---|
| Tuesday to Saturday | 09:00 to 21:00 |
| Sundays and public holidays | 09:00 to 15:00 |
| Monday | Closed, except a Monday before a holiday, which opens on holiday hours |
The museum is also closed on 1 and 6 January, 1 May, and 24, 25 and 31 December. It sits at the end of the old town walk, and the Oratorio de la Santa Cueva is about 250 m away, so the two combine easily in one morning.